During my summer internship at the Cimarron Group in Los Angeles (2012),I dedicated some of my down-time to a personal project: developing a light, inviting identity for a fictitious social networking platform (read—"shameless Twitter clone") named Shout!. I considered it an exercise in the consistent use of a single visual aesthetic across several pages of an information space.

technologies

PHP

MySQL

Platform page mockups

I used the completed visual designs to build out several pages in the browser, and took the opportunity to write a user registration and login system, complete with password hashing, password reset, and notification emails. User information was processed using PHP and stored in a MySQL database using PHP's MySQL API (this API has since been deprecated in favor of the MySQLi and PDO_MySQL drivers).

This marked one of my earliest experiences with backend programming,and the project was entirely self-motivated and self-taught.*opens code from two years ago* … *shudders* … *closes editor*